Sexual Trauma

The term sexual trauma refers to a sexual situation that causes intense fear because the subject, a child, is exposed to it in a state of passivity and unpreparedness. Classical psychiatry was already interested in traumas when Freud was developing his ideas. He borrowed the term, but replaced the psychiatric notion of a shock from a serious accident causing a fear of death with that of the impact of sexual aggressions against children. In a letter of October 15, 1895, he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess: "Have I revealed the great clinical...